Egypt’s Children

As night fell Tuesday, the crowd in Tahrir Square was barely diminished. People had climbed to the top of traffic lights and were waving Egyptian flags; a stuffed effigy hung from one of the poles. The crowd was full of sights and moments, a great mosaic of conversation and outbursts. At the center of a ring of mobile phones held up to take pictures was a famous Egyptian actress, Fardous Abdel Hamid, in full pancake makeup, wearing a large pair of black sunglasses. “Never stop believing!” she told a cluster of fans. “What you are doing has never been done before. This is the first revolution without political colors!” It was the first time she had come to Tahrir Square, and I asked her why she thought it was important to be there. “The Egyptian youth have taught us—the previous generation, that was unable to do anything—they have taught us to be a nation and they have taught us courage!”

I met Romy Raoof, a human-rights activist, who said he had been compiling a list of almost five hundred names of people who had gone missing throughout Egypt over the past week: “We have been checking hospitals, they could be detained in military prisons or dumped somewhere on the outskirts of Cairo.” I heard anger at official American pronouncements, which many in the crowd feel have been equivocal. One man told me, “Your support for our dictator will not be forgotten. He will go and we will stay—and we are Egyptians, we remember back seven thousand years.” Four men lay down in a heap in the middle of the street. One held a sign that read, “Mubarak, Ben Ali is waiting for U”—a reference to the fallen leader of Tunisia. Another ate a hot dog bun. They said they had not been home in five days, “and we’re not leaving until he’s gone.”

Rumors and bits of news mingled: “Did you hear what happened to Al Jazeera?” one woman asked me. I told her that I had seen six members of the Al Jazeera English team yesterday, after they had been taken by the military from their hotel room, detained, and had all their equipment confiscated. (They were later released into the care of the American Embassy.) Her friend added, “Have you heard that on the state channel they are saying there are only five thousand people on the square, and they keep showing pro-Mubarak demonstrations and there are only about a hundred and fifty people there?” A popular Egyptian song from the nineteen-seventies, “Egypt’s Children,” blasted through blurry loudspeakers.

There have been seven days of protests in Tahrir Square. Many people come for a few hours and go home and return; some stay, sleeping in flowerbeds and gutters. In the tiny mosque in the alleys behind the square, there was a line fifty people long to use the bathroom. The mosque has been operating as a makeshift field station, staffed by volunteer doctors, since last Tuesday. The doctors said they had had no shooting casualties since Saturday night, but there were plenty of people who were fainting, and suffering from high blood pressure or aching muscles from the cold nights. Soldiers, too, were coming in, with symptoms of exhaustion, tender muscles, and minor accidental injuries needing “a few sutures.” (The soldiers deployed next to tanks at the entrances to the Square are sleeping in situ, “in ten minute snatches,” one told me later.)

A girl who had collapsed with stomach pains was brought in, carried in the arms of an Army captain. Her parents had taken their four children to the square in the morning and the family had been there for six or seven hours. Her father, Amr Helmy, a former Army officer, told me that he believed it was important that they see the demonstration. “They need to start getting used to them!” he joked, “so they learn that they don’t have to be afraid. Our generation wasted our life in nonsense.”

Against a pillar sat a white-whiskered man in a grimy pink sweater. He was receiving treatment for hypertension. His name was Ahmed Abdo, and his son Eslam, twenty-six years old, was killed by a live bullet fired from the Interior Ministry on Saturday night. “We went to express our opinion,” he told me. “Thirty years. I’ve been afraid my entire life. But my son wasn’t afraid and I went with him to guard him.” His eyes filled with tears. He said he had been a soldier in the 1973 war against Israel. “I am a hero of the October war,” he said, “and my son is a hero of this revolution.” He got painfully to his feet and prepared to return to the square. He has not left since his son was shot and he told me he would not go home until Mubarak was gone.